Pulling Back the Image Curtain

Now that we’ve passed 2,600 blogs, which equates to one blog per day for 7.17 years, I thought it might be interesting to pull back the curtain on how we organize the images we share. Much of the way we look at images was influenced by our mentor, the late J.C. Raulston. J.C. once lamented how much it bothered him, that the only plants he ever talked about, were ones of which he had images. I took that to heart, and became rather obsessive about taking plant images.

Like all of us old codgers, we started with slides, which we took exclusively until December 2007. At the time, we had 30,364 filed and databased images. I’d be lying if I said I was thrilled with the idea of switching to digital cameras at age 50, but the rapidly advancing technology didn’t give me many options, as I’d already become a dinosaur when it came to trying to purchase slide film.

Fast forward to fall 2025, we now have on file 154,943 digital images, all taken since our switch. We scan a few slides as the need arises, but that’s a rare occurrence. Most folks I know, leave their images on their phones, but as a serial organizer, I find that maddening. I chose, therefore to download all images taken, whether they be taken on a phone or camera, onto my desktop computer, where they are stored in one of those many clouds I keep hearing about…probably an Accumulus imagus type. All of our images are high resolution files, usually 3.8-7.8 mb each.

To be able find the image files when needed, I created a filing system that made sense to my brain. The key for me was to limit the number of folders on each screen, so I can see all the folders on each page (using list view) without scrolling. For me, that translated into 70 main folders, of which 44 are plant genera or plant groups. Because 99+% of my images are plant photos, I set up the folders based on plant groups or in some case, the actual genera. If a plant genera or group isn’t important enough to warrant its own folder, those image go into a Misc. Plant Images folder. To accommodate all 18,044 folders, images are nested several folders deep, to retain full folder visibility without scrolling, at each level.

As an example, all plants with an underground storage organ are filed under the main folder, Geophytes. Within the Geophyte folder are 70 more folders. The large plant genera have their own folders, while those with less images are filed by letter….a,b,c, etc. Under the “letter folders” are more individual genera folders, and inside those are folders for each species within that genus. Images from JLBG that are landscape shots, and not of a specific plant, are in a single folder, JLBG Garden images, in which they are further subdivided by year taken. Within those folders, the images are further subdivided into subfolders, based on the section of the garden.

Outside of plant photos, other folders include travel, which have photos from all travels, which are then subdivided by the trip destination. The folder names include both the destination and the date of the trip. Photos from our 100+ collection trips are housed here in the “collection trip” folder. The “people” folder holds and array of people, or groups of people folders.

We typically take anywhere from 300 to 3,000 images per week, depending on the time of year. My rule is that those images must be moved from my phone/camera to the computer within a week, with the number of images on my phone/camera never allowed to exceed 500 images. Once they are downloaded to the computer, they are deleted from the phone/camera. Within 2-3 days, all newly taken images are evaluated, and reduced to only the best quality images. They are then labeled with a description and location taken, if other than here at JLBG. This usually results in 75% of the images taken each week, being deleted. Within a week, the remaining images are then moved into the storage folders described above.

Unlike some images, whose description never changes, that’s not the case for plant images. When a plant changes names for taxonomic reasons, we use a bulk rename program, which saves us a massive amount of time, such as changing aster to symphyotrichum, etc. There are many such programs, but one such example is http://bulkrenameutility.co.uk

For those not so endowed, this is how OCD organizing works. There is no right or wrong system, as long as it functions as you need it to function, which usually involves the ability to easily and quickly find images when you need them.